Myra here.

We have just launched our Literary Voyage Around The World 2018 reading challenge. As such, I felt that it is important for me to plan my 2018 Reading List and to also fit my reading across our quarterly reading themes in 2018. All of these novels have been hand-picked by me from my book shelves. One of my intentions is to read more of the books that I already have rather than purchase more titles (hah! as if!). We can always dream, can’t we?

Rather than shoot for Literary Globetrotter, I think it would be more realistic for me to shoot for Literary Vagabond in 2018.

While it was not difficult to look for books coming from different countries in my shelves, there is the added complication of trying to fit the titles within our quarterly reading themes (see below). I also would like to think that I have diversified my shelves considerably, with a lot of non-English titles from my travels. Yet despite this, I also realized that it was tough to reach around 80 countries or more. Perhaps if I really comb through each and every title (which is a near impossibility), especially those that I bought from my many travels, I would find a few more books set in countries that I have not included here. At any rate, I think a more conservative estimate would do me well, plus, I have a feeling this would change considerably during the course of the year as we get exposed to more books published in 2018, and taking into account as well the books that simply find us by accident, serendipity, chance. This would only serve as a rough-and-loose guideline, then, rather than a stringent, inflexible reading plan.

January – March 2018: Contours Of Love, Silhouettes of Infidelities, Shades of Romance

I just know I have other books from Greece, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries that I may not have tapped as of the moment. But, for starters, this shall be a rough-and-tumble kind of literary journey at least in the beginning, as I feel through our reading challenge.

How about you? Will you be taking a literary journey with us? What other books would you recommend from other countries that I have not included here?

Myra is a Teacher Educator and a registered clinical psychologist based in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Prior to moving to the Middle East, she lived for eleven years in Singapore serving as a teacher educator. She has edited five books on rediscovering children’s literature in Asia (with a focus on the Philippines, Malaysia, India, China, Japan) as part of the proceedings for the Asian Festival of Children’s Content where she served as the Chair of the Programme Committee for the Asian Children’s Writers and Illustrators Conference from 2011 until 2019. While she is an academic by day, she is a closet poet and a book hunter at heart. When she is not reading or writing about books or planning her next reads, she is hoping desperately to smash that shuttlecock to smithereens because Badminton Is Life (still looking for badminton courts here at UAE - suggestions are most welcome).